A. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to video recorder and playback systems; and, more particularly, it relates to command packets that may be inserted into a data transport stream.
B. Description of Related Art
Many previous systems that deal with digital video data, including the normal playback and trick play playback of that video data are intrinsically tied to the proprietary system and platform on which they are operating. There have also been many standards developed in this particular area of technology concerning data types. In addition, there have been several standards into which data is formatted for transport. One such transport standard is the motion picture expert group, MPEG-2 transport stream format (MPEG-2 TS). Many of the various data types are formatted into this MPEG-2 TS format for communication between various components in a system. The MPEG-2 TS will generically be referred to as MPEG TS in various remaining portions of this disclosure.
In addition, although there has been some uniformity in the development of TS formats, there has nevertheless been a dependence on dedicated communication and control between components that control the playback (including trick play playback) of the data and the device that performs the decoding of the data for playback. The control device and the decoding device may actually be in the same device, but there is nevertheless a great deal of dedicated interfacing that is required to perform the proper control of the data playback.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art conventional personal video recorder system 100. A host processor 110 is operable to control and/or provide data in a MPEG TS 115. The host processor provides and/or controls this data to a proprietary/conventional decoder 120. Again, the host processor 110 and the proprietary/conventional decoder 120 may also be included within a single device. The proprietary/conventional decoder 120 includes a host processor-specific dedicated, local intelligence 122 for decoding of trick play functions of the MPEG TS 115. Any other devices may also be used, besides a host processor 110, to control the decoding of the MPEG TS 115 and also to control any desired trick play functionality to be performed on the MPEG TS 115. To enable proper communication between the host processor 110 and the proprietary/conventional decoder 120, a great deal of interfacing is typically needed. In this situation, a dedicated communication/control interface 130 is required between the host processor 110 and the proprietary/conventional decoder 120. The host processor-specific dedicated, local intelligence 122 is operable to perform extraction of the commands, that may include some trick play functionality, and to perform modification of the MPEG TS 115. The proprietary/conventional decoder 120 is operable to perform MPEG data manipulation 124 that is required to enable trick play operations. The MPEG data manipulation modifies input MPEG data 125 and transforms it into modified MPEG data 126. This transformation is typically entirely proprietary and specific to the particular device used to perform this functionality.
Prior art systems are inoperable to perform direct trick play playback of MPEG data without performing proprietary modification of the input MPEG data 125 to transform it into the modified MPEG data 126 that includes the proper commands and controls to perform trick play playback of the input MPEG data 125. The modified MPEG data 126, within the proprietary system, is a data form that does not fall within the MPEG standard any longer. The data has been modified, as uniquely required, within the proprietary system to enable playback of the data in the proper manner. Other proprietary systems also perform similar modification of the data, as required within their respective systems. Typically, no two proprietary systems perform this modification of the data to enable playback in a similar manner.
This great deal of dedicated communication/control interfacing 130 is required to enable trick play operation, given that there the manipulation of the received MPEG TS 115, in transforming the input MPEG data 125 into the modified MPEG data 126, must be performed to enable trick play operations. Again, this inherently requires a great deal of interfacing, by communicating a great deal of command and control information, between the host processor 110 and the proprietary/conventional decoder 120. This great deal of interfacing between the devices requires a very large dedication of real estate in previous systems. Even in situations where the host processor 110 and the proprietary/conventional decoder 120 are contained within a single device, there must nevertheless be a great deal of interfacing between those two devices in the single device, again requiring a great deal of interfacing and also consuming much real estate in the single device system; the two components (even within a single device), one for command and control and one for decoding, must nevertheless be included within a single device. The output from the proprietary/conventional decoder 120 provides the now-modified MPEG data 126 to a display 140.
In the conventional situation, the data processing and data transfer requirements for MPEG data manipulation and modification, within the conventional personal video recorder system 100, requires a great deal of communication and processing requirements. From certain perspectives, conventional personal video recorder systems, that are capable to do trick play playback, inherently require dedicated communication and control within the self-contained system. This communication and control must all be tailored to the specific, proprietary system in which the data is to be played using trick play functionality.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional systems will become apparent to one of skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.